Owen Park’s Little Free Library

Things we haven’t done before: 1) haul a toilet around in the back of our truck for three days, 2) set off flea bombs (multiple times) in an empty house, 3) maintain a little library in our front yard.

This blog post is about the third thing.

During our first and only showing of the house before we made an offer, our wonderful realtor, Joy, ended it with an explanation about the structure on the corner of our front yard. It was a small box with a frosted glass front, a gabled roof with a tattered flag at the peak, and a floating fairy painted on the back.

“It’s a library – the neighbors can take a book and leave a book. It has shelves of books inside the box. Isn’t that cool?” she said as we stood on the front porch.

It’s possible this piece of information is what tossed us happily over the edge. We knew the house had charm peeking out from behind the long list of remodel projects, but the little front yard library made me swoon. When Joy said it had shelves filled with books, a little memory flashed across my mind of the days when I used to read books that required fingers for turning pages instead of swiping a screen. We have a fairly substantial home library with an entire wall of bookshelves in the living room and a front office with two walls of built-in bookshelves. But we started this purge thing and now we’re working to reduce our consumption, get rid of what we no longer use, and cease making purchases that take up precious space we won’t have in the new house. So our home library is being phased out. I have four small shelves of books that I will keep, but everything else is gone or is going. Hit me up for free books if you are starting your own home library.

This is hard for me because I’ve always been able to justify books. If we were cutting back on our spending, I budgeted in a monthly allowance for books. Being surrounded by them brings comfort and security, but I can’t justify keeping them in mass quantities. Rarely do I read a book more than once, except for Catcher in the Rye and anything by Anna Quindlen (look her up, please). Those are on my stay shelf, but most of my books are there because I need them near me and they look really good, which sounds like the basis for a bad relationship. I like to think of it as an unnecessary relationship. But still, I do love books.

So we have this quaint little library that we’ll maintain and freshen up, replace the flag, paint over the floating fairy, and continually weed out the religious tracts and booklets that keep showing up on the shelves. I’m considering taking it a step further and registering our library with Little Free Library, a non-profit started by creative artisan Todd Bol and youth and community development educator Rick Brooks. Their social enterprise was inspired by Andrew Carnegie (again, please look him up), social empowerment movements in developing countries, Lutie Stearn’s “traveling little libraries”, and community gift-sharing networks. These are all things that make my heart happy. It started small, with Bol building a replica of a one-room schoolhouse that he filled with books. He put the box in his front yard with a sign that read, “Free Books”. It was a tribute to his mother, a teacher who loved to read. He made several more and gave them to friends so the little library concept could continue. The goal was to build 2,510 little libraries through a network of people who would build their own library or order one through the non-profit and place it in a public space. As of November 2016, there are 50,000 registered Free Little Libraries worldwide and additional libraries that are unregistered and unaccounted for, including ours. Bol’s small project has turned into a worldwide enterprise.

Fernando, our amazing contractor who is bringing the Rosedale house back to life, told us that he sees neighbors stopping to take and leave books, so the little library continues to give back, even though the house is empty for now.

These days, my own life and the happenings in the world leave me feeling a little overwhelmed. I’m not one to start small, but instead usually like to jump in with big ideas and ambitious projects. I don’t have the patience for slow and small. I want to change the world and do it as fast as possible. But what they say is true – change often starts with people like you and me doing their part to make the space around them kinder, brighter, more grace-filled and joyful. So while I still have my eyes focused on what is across the ocean, I’m also learning to look carefully at what is close to home. Nothing is insignificant. Even a little box filled with books for my neighbors and their children.